陽池 Yangchi
“Yang Pool” · TH4
Hand Shaoyang · 4 of 23 · yuan-source
Where. On the back wrist crease, in the dip on the little-finger side of the finger tendons.
For. Wrist pain; aching shoulder and arm; ringing ears.
Press. Light fingertip pressure, not into the joint, about a minute each wrist.
陽池，一名別陽，在手表上腕上陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Yangchi Sits at the Wrist
Turn the palm down and look at the back of your wrist: a skin crease crosses it where the hand joins the forearm — the dorsal transverse wrist crease of the location books. The dataset places Yangchi on that crease, in the depression on the ulnar side of the tendon of the common extensor muscle of the fingers. Unpacked: the common extensor is the muscle on the back of the forearm whose flat tendon fans out toward the fingers, and its ulnar side means the edge toward the little finger, away from the thumb. When the hand hangs relaxed, a small, yielding hollow opens exactly there — a pocket of soft tissue wedged between tendon and crease, easy to miss until you know to look.
Neighbours orient the map. Toward the fingers, the channel’s previous stop is Zhongzhu (TH3), seated on the back of the hand between the fourth and fifth metacarpal bones; toward the elbow, the next is Waiguan (TH5), recorded two cun above this same dorsal crease on the line running from Yangchi toward the tip of the elbow. Yangchi therefore works as a hinge in the sequence — the gate where the channel leaves the open ground of the hand and steps onto the narrow causeway of the wrist. A cun, as ever in this system, is a proportional measure taken from the person being examined, not a fixed centimetre value; the landmark method below spares you any arithmetic.
What lies beneath deserves a moment of respect before pressing starts. Here the skin lies close over the extensor tendon, and below the tendon come the wrist joint’s own capsule and small structures — a thin covering compared with the padded territories of thigh or shoulder. The wrist is also one of the body’s busiest joints, crossed by tendons that slide with every gesture. None of this makes the point off-limits; it makes it a place for light fingertips rather than determined thumbs. The geography rewards patience: the hollow announces itself to a quiet hand far more clearly than to a forceful one.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit comfortably and rest your left forearm on a table, palm down and fingers curled loosely. Clench the fist gently and watch the back of the wrist: a cord stands up roughly down the middle — that is the tendon of the finger extensors announcing itself. Relax the fist and let the tendon soften. Now lay the pad of your right index finger on the dorsal crease, just on the little-finger side of that central tendon, and press feather-light: the fingertip should settle into a small hollow, a softness between tendon and crease that the surrounding skin does not share. Repeat with hands swapped so both wrists receive the same attention.
Two quick confirmations help before any real pressing begins. First, compare wrists with the same light touch: many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true spot and little sensation half a finger-width away, and the two sides often differ slightly. Second, let the fingers of the resting hand curl and uncurl slowly while your exploring fingertip stays put — the tendon beside you will tighten and slacken while the hollow itself stays quietly soft, confirming you are beside the tendon rather than on it. If everything feels uniformly tight everywhere, lift the finger, breathe, and search again a few millimetres at a time; the point is a small zone, not a pinhead, and calm repetition finds it faster than pressure ever could.
The usual slips are easy to name. Drifting toward the thumb side carries you into the crowded corridor where several tendons run side by side — useful territory, but not the recorded location, which keeps to the single quiet hollow beyond the central tendon. Pressing into the crease fold itself finds taut skin rather than the depression beside it. And sliding too far up the forearm leaves the wrist altogether and enters Waiguan’s neighbourhood. Whenever the search loses its way, return to the opening ritual — gentle fist up, tendon seen, fist released, hollow found — and begin again unhurried.
Reading the Name: Yang Pool
The two characters sketch the scene in miniature. Yang 陽 is the familiar word for the bright, active principle — classically the sunlit, south-facing slope of a hill, the side that catches the morning. Chi 池 means pool: a pond, a basin of collected water, a reservoir that receives and holds. Read together as Yang Pool, the name fits the wrist twice over. The back of the limb belongs to yang in classical anatomy, while the palm side belongs to yin, and the San Jiao channel is a yang channel travelling the outer aspect of the arm; meanwhile the little depression at the crease genuinely resembles a tiny basin set beside the tendon — a pool carved into firm country. Point names in this tradition work as compressed field notes: gates, valleys, courtyards, pools, each one doubling as a location hint and a small piece of old physiology.
The name also marks an office. Classical teaching assigns each of the twelve principal channels a yuan-source point — a place where the qi of that channel is understood to pool nearest the surface, something like the residence where a household keeps its seal. Yangchi holds this post for the San Jiao channel, sitting just beyond the channel’s stream point Zhongzhu as the pathway crosses the wrist. The rank goes some way toward explaining the breadth of the traditional portfolio: a channel whose source-pool lies here runs, in the classical maps, all the way from the ring finger up the outer arm, past the ear toward the temple and brow — twenty-three stations in all — so the wrist-end pool came to be consulted for complaints gathered from the whole journey.
Pinyin writes the name Yángchí, with a rising second tone on yang and another rising second tone on chi, so the word lifts twice as it leaves the mouth. The hanzi pair 陽池 is compact enough to memorise at a glance. Water imagery runs deeper than decoration here: classical texts describe the San Jiao as the system entrusted with the body’s waterways, and a pool name on such a channel reads as a deliberate choice — a place where moving water slows and gathers. However one weighs the old physiology, the practical instruction inside the name survives intact: come to the back of the wrist, find where the hollow holds still, and treat it as somewhere worth keeping full, not somewhere to be emptied by force.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The licensed record lists Yangchi’s traditional applications as follows: wrist pain; shoulder and arm pain; red swollen eyes; tinnitus; deafness; sore throat; and the wasting and thirst disorder. Read as a landscape rather than a pharmacy list, three clusters emerge. The first is strictly local — the wrist and the arm above it, the very country the point inhabits. The second gathers the head and senses: red swollen eyes, ringing ears, failing hearing, a painful throat. The third holds a single systemic entry, the old pattern named wasting and thirst, which classical medicine assembled from persistent thirst, hunger, and the melting away of flesh.
Each cluster carries its own traditional logic. Local pain needs little explaining: a point at the wrist was naturally consulted for the wrist, and for the shoulder-and-arm corridor the channel traverses above it. The sensory cluster follows the channel’s mapped course upward — from the wrist the pathway climbs the back of the forearm and arm, crosses the shoulder country, and in the classical drawings sweeps past the ear toward the temple and brow, so discomfort appearing along that route was approached at stations on the way. The wasting-and-thirst entry reflects the channel’s ancient association with the body’s fluids; classical writers grouped unrelenting thirst, voracious hunger, and progressive thinning under that single pattern-name. Today those same signs call promptly for proper medical assessment, and the historical vocabulary is offered here purely as context.
It bears repeating plainly: these are traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats disease, and several entries translate poorly into modern life — new or worsening hearing loss, persistent ringing, or a red painful eye belong with medical professionals promptly, not with a pressure routine. Where modern research has touched self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition lightly, and hold the safety rules firmly; the remaining sections do exactly that.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the hollow located by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, forearm supported on a table, palm down, wrist neutral rather than bent. Warm your hands first — chilled fingers make tissue guard. Place the pad of your opposite thumb, or an index finger pad, on the hollow and begin with contact alone for a few slow breaths; then add small, unhurried circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath rather than grinding down onto the joint line. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or mild warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to slow exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Swap hands and treat both wrists alike.
Quality outranks intensity, as everywhere in self-care, and the wrist adds a rule of its own: never press it while it is working. Typing with the wrist cocked, carrying groceries, gripping a rail on a moving bus — these are moments for the joint to do its job, not moments to load pressure onto it. Choose a quiet interval instead, hands idle, and keep fingernails trimmed so the pad rather than any edge meets the skin. No tools belong in this work; rollers and pointed devices concentrate force in ways fingertips were never meant to. People who keep the habit usually anchor it to something already in the day — the kettle boiling, a laptop closed for lunch — because regularity, not heroics, is what home practice asks for.
Treat the session as a short ceremony of attention rather than a repair job. Notice what accumulates across weeks: perhaps the wrist feels less guarded when you wake, perhaps the shoulders drop a notch while you press, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spent two minutes caring for a joint that carries a thousand small loads a day. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — pressing harder, longer, or deeper to force a result, or continuing through pain in the hope that persistence converts into benefit. When curiosity pulls toward force, return to gentleness, or set the practice down for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Yangchi arrives with a notably quiet file: the licensed dataset records no cautions for this point, and the echo of that record in this module is deliberately empty. Quiet is not the same as careless, though. The wrist keeps its working parts close to the surface — tendon, joint capsule, and the small structures that let the hand move fluently — so everything about this point favours staying strictly superficial. Gentle fingertip contact on the skin engages none of what the location books treat delicately; force driven inward is another matter entirely, and home practice simply never has a reason to go there.
Practical limits follow. Skip the point whenever the skin over the wrist is cut, abraded, blistered, or inflamed, and while any skin condition there is active. Pause entirely after a recent wrist injury — sprain, fracture, burn, surgery — until ordinary use of the hand has been cleared by someone qualified, and ask a professional before adding any pressure routine if a wrist condition is currently active or newly painful. People who are pregnant, and anyone living with a chronic illness, do well to consult a qualified practitioner before beginning new point practices of any kind. During every session the stop signals stand: sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means finish at once and do not try again that day; lingering ache afterward means the pressure exceeded what the tissue welcomed.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical attention — not a longer pressing session — after a fall onto the hand followed by swelling, deformity, or inability to move the wrist; for numbness or tingling in the fingers that persists or worsens; for new or worsening hearing loss or a red, painful eye; and for unrelenting thirst with weight loss, the modern descendants of the old wasting-and-thirst picture. Persistent symptoms of any kind belong with a licensed practitioner — medical or East Asian medical, as suits the complaint. The pool at the wrist is a fine place to visit gently; anything that frightens you deserves the road to proper care.
Yangchi, the Yang Pool, rests in a soft hollow on the back of the wrist, at the crease where hand meets forearm. Tradition assigns it an honoured office — yuan-source point of the San Jiao channel — and reached here for wrist complaints, aching shoulders, and troubles of the eyes and ears. This guide covers finding it by touch, pressing it gently, and keeping the practice safely kind.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Yangchi without knowing anything about cun?
- Let the tendon draw the map. Rest the hand palm-down, clench gently, and watch the cord rise down the middle of the wrist’s back; release, and feel for the small hollow immediately on the little-finger side of that cord, level with the dorsal crease. That hollow is the location the dataset describes. Cun measurements simply encode the same landmarks in proportional language.
- Is pressing Yangchi myself actually safe?
- For healthy adults, light fingertip pressure held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care: the point sits over tendon and joint structures that gentle contact engages hardly at all, and home practice never approaches the techniques the classical literature reserves for trained hands. The dataset records no special caution for this point, but the universal rules still govern — no tools, no force inward, nothing over broken skin, and an immediate stop on sharp or electric sensation.
- What did classical practice use Yangchi for?
- The traditional record lists wrist pain, shoulder and arm pain, red swollen eyes, tinnitus, deafness, sore throat, and the wasting-and-thirst pattern. Its standing as the San Jiao channel’s yuan-source point — the place that channel’s qi was said to pool — explains why a wrist station carried questions from the whole route up to the head. Those are traditional frameworks, documented for context, not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why do eye and ear complaints appear under a wrist point?
- Because of where the channel travels. Classical maps trace the San Jiao pathway from the ring finger, through this wrist hollow, up the back of the forearm and arm, across the shoulder country, and onward past the ear toward the temple and brow. A point on that road was traditionally consulted for trouble appearing further along it — hence the eye, ear, and throat entries gathered under a wrist-side name.
- Can pressing Yangchi take the place of medical care for my symptoms?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not a diagnostic tool, and it cannot assess a wrist, examine an ear, or measure anything at all. Red flags — a fall onto the hand with swelling or deformity, persistent numbness in the fingers, new hearing loss, a painful red eye, relentless thirst with weight loss — need prompt professional evaluation. Think of daily self-care and clinical medicine as different floors of the same building: the quiet routine lives downstairs, and the consulting room upstairs opens whenever symptoms persist, escalate, or frighten you.
Sources
- 01WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — nomenclature conventions.
- 02A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition, yuan-source theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for TH4 Yangchi — location, point class, actions, and indication record.
Last reviewed
牌記This leaf, for machines
Old books ended with a colophon saying who printed them. Every leaf here carries the same facts as structured data for agents and search, with no layout in the way.
- GET /en/points/th4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/th4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/th4/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "TH4",
"name": {
"en": "Yangchi",
"gloss": "Yang Pool",
"zh-Hant": "陽池",
"zh-Hans": "阳池"
},
"channel": {
"id": "TH",
"order": 4,
"of": 23
},
"location": {
"text": "On the back wrist crease, in the dip on the little-finger side of the finger tendons."
},
"for": [
"wrist pain",
"aching shoulder and arm",
"ringing ears"
],
"press": {
"text": "Light fingertip pressure, not into the joint, about a minute each wrist.",
"seconds": 60
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/th4",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}